Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 35 3 d Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
The usual replication argument needs two hypotheses implicit in the pricing conclusion: the strategy must replicate the payoff, , and its discounted gains must be integrable. Bounded predictable risky holdings suffice for the latter. Under these conditions, the equivalent martingale measure and part (c) giveThus discounted wealth is a martingale, and repeated conditioning givesFor a normalized initial bank account, , deterministic terminal bank value, and trivial initial information, this reduces to the intended risk-neutral pricing formulaIf is random it must remain inside the expectation. If a claim is not replicable, the existence of an equivalent martingale measure alone does not make its arbitrage-free price unique.
The discounted wealth martingale integrability condition cannot simply be dropped. For a concrete counterexample, set , , , and , where is uniform on and an independent fair sign. These positive bounded prices form a martingale in the natural filtration. Start with zero holdings; at time one buy shares financed by borrowing . This is previsible and self-financing, but its terminal wealth is , whose absolute expectation is infinite. It is therefore not a martingale. The stated pricing proof applies to the standard integrable replication class, rather than all unconstrained previsible strategies.